Week 7: Part II, chapters 8, 9, and 10

[[deleted user]]

von Lembke. I did appreciate von Lembke trying to communicate his true thoughts and feelings to Yulia Mikhailovna. Isn't that perhaps often a goal of a good marriage? To be able to speak openly to one's spouse? "We are as it were, two abstract beings in a balloon, who have met in order to speak out the truth" (439). [OK, I don't get the balloon, but the rest was lovely.]

And how does Yulia respond to his opening himself up to her?
She laughs in his face.
She gives him the silent treatment--as is her wont.
Later, "not a single word...not a single glance in his direction---as though he were not even in the room" (450).
She knows exactly how to hurt him. "I'll make him pay."

I confess, I felt very sorry for Lembke. How can he still care for her so much?

---

Stepan TV's finest moment thus far: He speaks so very graciously to the almost sobbing Lembke:

"Your Excellency, trouble yourself no more over my peevish complaint, and simply order my books and letters returned..." (449).

Well done, Stepan Trofimovich. Well done.

--

von Lembke to Yulia regarding the power distribution in their marriage---though he could just as well have been speaking of Russia's situation:

"Two centers cannot exist..... two are impossible"(439).

[[deleted user]]

This probably doesn't flow the same in Russian, but in English in this book "fate" has popped up now and again, and then again, and then became almost a chant or drums beating ever louder in the background in the last few chapters with all the talk of Before the Fete and of Yulia's planned fete and Varvara's planned fete, and A Fatal Morning, and now "the fatal question" (457).

EDIT ADDED: Words I didn't start circling early in the reading---before they seemed important--are difficult to find...but a found a couple of the earlier appearances of "fatal."

From "Night (Cont.)" "But the marriage is kept covered up, Nikolai V, covered up, fatal secret" (266).

From "All in Expectation: "They [the ladies] all stubbornly continued to suppose some romance, some fatal family secret that had taken place in Switzerland..." (295).



In English, it seemed to have built to this point.

---

LOL, I noticed the "fake news" in "the Petersburg newspapers" and the 19th-century equivalent of a Go-Fund-Me accoount/ "a subscription for her benefit was set up" (445).

[[deleted user]]

Say, this is interesting. Regarding the speech characteristics that keep cropping up. {usually described as a "lisp."] Here on page 295:

"The general....was still speaking.... In doing so, he drew his words out especially, with a sugary enunciation, a habit he had probably borrowed from Russians traveling abroad, OR from those formerly wealthy Russian landowners who had been most ruined by the peasant reform.

Stepan Trofimovich even noted once that the more ruined a landowner was, the more sugary he lisped and drew out his words.

He himself, however, had the same sugary drawl and lisp, without noticing it in himself."

I don't think timewise (???) that STV's family would have been financially ruined due to the peasant's reform, but perhaps some other event financially wiped out his family in the early 1800s and THAT was why he was raised in a upper class home (relative?) in Moscow and perhaps because of that he has always tried to overcompensate for feelings of inferiority.